When the Stars Went Out
by Snarky64
Summary: A boy considers the nature of power and powerlessness. The Teachers' Lounge Ultimate Iron Fic Challenge, Round Two.


_The Teachers' Lounge Ultimate Iron Fic Challenge, Round Two._

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Just who was this bully with the mean sneer, his face twisted with spite, fat and sweating, spittle accumulating with crumbs of food at the corners of his plump lips, menacing, taunting? In his abject fear, the boy cowered away from the bully, trying to escape the blows of the bully's meaty fists as they bruised his ribs and made his ears ring as they clouted his head. The boy edged further back in the corner, his puny arms folding over his head, his knees raised to cover his stomach.

"Please don't, please stop!"

His pleas only made the bully laugh more loudly, crowing, as the crowd behind encouraged every blow and kick and congratulated every insult.

"You're such a cry-baby! You make me sick," the bully spat, and the faceless crowd took up the chant.

"Cry-baby! Cry-baby!"

Hot tears of shame and pain pricked at the boy's eyes, and then he was overwhelmed with fear and sickness at the delight his tears caused the bully whose sneering smile grew ever wider.

The crowd's laughter increased, so loud and mortifying that the boy thought his heart would burst. With one particularly vicious blow to his head, his vision swam. He knew he was going to faint, and then he would be truly helpless and at the bully's mercy, and there was no mercy in those hard, piggy eyes.

He fought back to consciousness, his heart racing, his palms sweating, forcing himself to think clearly, to focus – to wake!

Dudley's eyes flew open.

That dream again! He swallowed and left his bed unsteadily to fetch a glass of water. His hand shook as he reached for the tap. He froze and looked at his own hand – the same hand – the meaty fists – that had pummelled his dream-self so mercilessly.

He sat heavily at the kitchen table and let his head fall into his hands. Every night without fail, he remembered.

That _thing!_ He hadn't seen it but he'd felt it, and felt it every night since that night in the alleyway. He drew in a ragged breath as he remembered that night when the stars had gone out and the hot, stilted summer air had frozen. He had hit his cousin, believing Harry was doing that freaky stuff – that magic. But whatever it was hadn't stopped when he'd blindsided Harry. It had immobilised him on the ground – he'd felt something scabrous and slimy holding his wrists. He had felt it coming closer and closer – dank, foetid breath had brushed his face and then Dudley had seen himself truly.

And what Dudley truly was had been a discovery he had desperately tried to repress, but every night the dream returned and he was faced with himself, hurt and shamed by himself as if … as if … Dudley struggled to put his feelings into words. As if he had to feel the pain he caused to realise that he caused it. He wasn't sure that made sense. All he knew was that until that night in the alleyway he had thought he deserved respect from others because he was powerful – he was _entitled_ to it. Hadn't his father always told him so? And wasn't fear a legitimate a way to get respect as any other?

But now he knew what he was – that thing had turned him inside out and made him see, and he hated what he saw. He hated the dream where he was Harry or Mark Evans, or where he watched as he stuffed himself with food, snatching from his mother's plate or from Harry's and then feeling Harry's hunger seemingly gnawing at his backbone, and his disgust as grease smeared Dudley's screwed up, fat face.

Every night he saw it: he was spoilt, rude, fat; he was grotesque. He was despised. He was hated.

And he deserved it.

Dudley's heart raced as he struggled to regain his composure. He wasn't the powerful junior championship boxer, growing into a man others would respect or fear (because those things were synonymous, his father had said). He had believed his father, had emulated him. He had wanted to be just like him, but his father had lied to him. Those things weren't the same, not at all.

He had seen power – had felt it.

That magic Harry had done in the alleyway, that was power. He still had flashes of the bright white shape - he didn't recognise the shape, just that it had burnt away the freezing cold and lightened the oppression of his soul. Scrawny Harry had done that. Harry had saved him, and Dudley didn't know how he felt about that. It confused him; it angered him, but he knew it was true. Harry had power.

And that old professor who came last week to take Harry for the summer, he was powerful. Dudley didn't know much about wizards but he knew that. He could feel that power when the professor had visited them. He wasn't like Dad at all: he spoke politely although that thing he did with their sofa wasn't polite – that's what Mum said. And there was no way Dudley would ever have drunk that drink – he remembered what had happened to his tongue before. Dad said that professor was a doddering old freak – although not in front of him, Dudley realised. Then Dudley remembered – the professor had talked about him, had said they had been cruel to Harry, had said Dudley was damaged.

Dudley wanted to grasp that straw: that it wasn't his fault – that his parents had damaged him and he was blameless. But every night, he relived that terrible truth. Until he did something about that truth, in his heart he knew that he would remain as powerless as he had been on that night when the stars went out.

 **~FIN~**

The prompt was 'Power'.


End file.
